


Withdraw Their Shining

by fluffernutter8



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Holocaust references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 21:04:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7006816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve destroys a HYDRA base in Czechoslovakia in 1944. Moments later he finds something worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Withdraw Their Shining

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: wartime
> 
> Title is from Joel 2:10: "the sun and moon darken, and the stars withdraw their shining." (I was almost going to use something from Genesis 15:17, or Ezekiel 32:7- which uses basically the same wording- but they were too on the nose in context and they creeped me out.)

The stars over the desert are the brightest Steve has ever seen.

This time last year, all he’d ever known was the dimmed glimpses between city buildings. But he has points of comparison now. He knows what the stars look like from a bus window in Colorado and from a picnic table outside a Louisiana diner. He knows what they look like in the Austrian forest, and now on a calm night in Tunisia.

He doesn’t remember what they looked like glinting down on a train car in Czechoslovakia.

Something moves out of the tents behind him. They don’t have a fire going- they’re trying to stay inconspicuous- but Steve doesn’t need light or even a look to tell who is walking toward him.

“Are you alright?” Agent Carter asks. She settles down next to him.

“Fine. Just thinking.”

“What about?”

“The goddamn-” He checks himself, takes a breath, resets. His voice deepens. “The train. Still.”

* * *

_Steve had never thought of himself as a newshound, but he was fairly well informed. Even before the US entered the war, he listened to the radio. He read the papers. He thought he knew what was happening to people over here._

_He had no idea._

_They’d still been able to see the smoke from the HYDRA base they’d just…“blown up” seemed too mild a term. “Cratered” might have been more appropriate. Steve was wrestling with some rations that he had tucked into his pocket; he was always hungry now, but especially after he’d been in a fight. He had just opened them when Gabe, walking ahead of him, held up a hand and pointed out the train._

_It was stopped, two soldiers in German uniform sharing a cigarette by the engine. Gabe and Monty disposed of them and the others inside without breaking the country stillness. Which left Steve to figure out what to do with a train full of what was probably supplies. The cars didn’t look fit for much else. Dernier was already lifting several sticks of dynamite in suggestion, although Steve hated the waste. Still, if the other option was leaving it for the Germans…_

_That was when he had heard the breathing._

_He thought it was animals at first. As soon as he and Bucky hauled open the doors, he wished it had been._

_“Jesus,” said Bucky beside him, voice a low, gaping ripple. “Jesus Christ.” It’s what Steve had been thinking too, what he couldn’t manage to say._

_There were more people inside the train than Steve would have imagined could fit. They were standing, most of them. They looked stricken into silence. One woman, close to the door, held a baby. Steve had been through enough frigid tenement winters to know what the slackness of the small body and the mother’s vacant rocking meant._

_Sometimes Steve felt untried. He had been successful at Azzano and afterward, but he had seen less than the Commandos, had less leadership experience than Bucky. It didn’t matter now. None of them were prepared for this._

_“Jim,” Steve said after a minute. The people inside the train were beginning to move. A low murmur was starting as they saw his uniform and heard him speak. “Get on the radio. We need…” They needed too much, but Morita just nodded and unstrapped the radio. “Gabe, there must be someone who speaks French or German. We need to know where these people came from and where they were being taken. Dum Dum-” But Dugan wasn’t listening. He was taking off his vest and laying it flat across his arms, offering them to the woman with the baby. Steve cleared his throat, summoned his voice. “The rest of us will get these cars open.” He turned away. He handed his ration pack to the first person he saw when he opened the next door. The action felt impossibly tiny._

_They ended up sitting there for two days, scrounging for enough food and some sort of medical treatment and a place to keep everyone warm. No one wanted to stay in the train cars. They were filthy from dozens of people being packed inside them for what they thought was three days. Even if they had been palaces, Steve would never have made them go back._

_Between wrangling things, Steve and Gabe and Jim were on the radio with headquarters. They had missed their pickup, and while the SSR was willing to arrange another one, the Commandos weren’t ready to leave._

_“These people have no homes,” Steve said, finally talking to Phillips after several hours of getting the runaround from lower ranking officers. “They’re civilians, hundreds of miles from where they came from, with no supplies. And even if they could go back, who’s to say the same thing won’t happen again?” He tried to cover the nausea in his voice as he said, “Sir, the stories they have about the place they were being taken…they’re unbelievable.”_

_There was a pause. When Phillips spoke again, his voice had even more military gruffness than usual. “I believe ‘em, Captain.”_

_It took Steve half a minute to figure out what that meant. “We_ knew _about this?” His voice was loud enough that Jim came toward him through the trees with a frown. Steve waved him away._

_Suddenly infiltrating HYDRA bases seemed far less important, far more futile._

_“We know a lot of things that you don’t, Rogers. Now I’ve got transportation, supplies, and reinforcements on their way to you, so you’d better avail yourself of them and think about thanking me come Sunday.”_

_It was clear he was done with the conversation. Steve did not feel the same. “Sir, when I get back to headquarters, I’d like to be reassigned to the unit handling this situation.”_

_“Ask, but ye shall not receive.” His drawl was starting to make Steve furious. “You’re an asset, Rogers, and I put my assets where they’re needed. You’re staying on HYDRA.” The radio crackled for a moment. “And besides, there is no unit handling this.”_

_“That’s fucking bullshit.” Steve considered adding ‘with all due respect, sir,’ but he didn’t think it would have mattered at that point, and he also didn't think it would be honest._

_“I’m going to pretend that was some radio static,” Phillips said coldly. “When your ride shows up tomorrow, I expect you to be on it.”_

_The Commandos spent the last few hours making sure things were settled, as much as they could be. The people were highly capable- treatment for the ill and injured had been handed over almost immediately to the handful of doctors and medical students among them, people had started to take apart the train cars and use the pieces, and there was even a pair of rabbis conducting religious rites - but any group of several hundred thrown into the wilderness together was going to need some organized leadership._

_The plane touched down with some supplies and a handful of soldiers to take over from the Commandos. Steve could see them trying to keep their masks on. One of them saw Eva, a member of the leadership council, bone thin and sharp tongued. She reminded Steve of ten mothers on his street growing up. Steve could see the masks fail._

_They'd all seen civilians caught in the war, whole towns destroyed, even. But there was something so purposeful and malignant to this that they were all caught between staring toward and looking away._

_Dernier was the last onto the plane. Steve watched from the open hatch as he walked over to Eva and opened his pack. He handed her every stick of dynamite he had. He pointed to the train tracks. Eva nodded._

_They were quiet on the plane. “I’d heard things, back in the neighborhood,” Bucky said, sometime in the inky, starless black. Steve nodded. He knew people back home who’d gotten letters from family still in Europe talking about terrible things. But he had assumed...exaggeration, maybe? The fever pitch of fear and the unknown driving people to believe terrified whispers. But now he understood that it was what they had known that was the most frightening, and he was the one who had been too ignorant to believe._

_Dernier, hands loose over bent knees, said something. Jones translated. “A year and a half back, when he was already with the Resistance, they took all the Jews in Paris and packed them into a stadium. More than ten thousand. Then,” he swallowed. “They put them all on trains.”_

_No one said anything. Morita stared straight ahead, blank-faced. Steve felt shame and distress press in, just looking at him, thinking about Jim signing up for this while his family was carted away from their home, put into a camp that the government said would be fine and temporary._

_He tried to think that there were lines his government wouldn’t cross, but the lines weren’t where he’d thought and he wasn’t sure how solidly they’d hold._

_For the first time, he wanted to call a press conference. He remembered Madison Square Garden, a few months before the serum. Thousands of people had showed up to stop Hitler then. Surely thousands more would come for this._

_But Phillips must have known that line of thought, because they didn’t go back to headquarters, they went straight to Tunisia. The North African campaign had been over for months, but there were rumors of an additional HYDRA base in the area._

_They got their orders from Agent Carter, flown in special. Steve watched her. He tried to tell if she had known._

* * *

“I cried when I read the first intelligence report,” Agent Carter says plainly.

Steve looks at her for a second. “That doesn’t- You don’t seem the type.”

“I’m not. But I’m also not made of stone.”

"Of course you aren’t.” The reply is prompt and automatic, because Peggy Carter is controlled and capable and brilliant, but the only thing that’s stone about her is the strength of her right hook. Something about the shadows of her face makes him think that she wears a momentary smile because of his surety in that.

“I can’t agree with the priorities being set,” she says sometime later, her voice upright, the smile wiped clean. “The idea that equipment or public relations is more important than human life ended horribly is...abhorrent to me. But I understand the sentiment that the only way out is through. And what we’re doing here, that is a way through.”

Steve stares out at the desert. It’s not the dark that makes him unable to see. He had volunteered for the watch, knowing he wouldn't sleep anyway. Now he wonders if he is too distracted for this too.

“I know that stopping HYDRA is important,” he says. “But the choice we're making… If you'd seen that train, you wouldn't be able to stop thinking about it. And we're doing _nothing_. The things that are happening as we're sitting here, the things that we're letting happen...I don't know if I can live with them.”

“This is what we have chosen. To be a part of this, to wrestle with decisions, to be analyzed by history.” He makes a noise, soft and derisive, from beside her.

“We're wrong to lay down like this. No matter what history analyzes.” He grips at handfuls of sand. The grains cut into his palms.

“Stopping HYDRA is important.” She repeats his words to him, but with something more in her voice. He turns, tries to make out her face. “But there can be more than one important thing.” She tips her head back. “Did you know, Captain, that I have a pair of school friends currently in Tunis? Yes, they're journalists. Their work is quite good. And I think they would be happy to get a first person account of some of the lesser known elements of the European conflict, especially if it came from a reputable army source.” Her voice is serene. Steve stares. “As a matter of coincidence, I believe that we will be stopping nearby after we've finished our work here. I'd love to catch up with them, if you'd like to join me.”

Steve thinks of courts martial and the way Peggy's uniform fits her so easily. His chest feels splayed open. “I'd love to come with you,” he says, the words breathing out of him.

“Excellent. As another matter of coincidence, the ordnance order for your unit seems to have increased. It seems a shame to let all those extra explosives go to waste. So if you and the boys happen to be near something that looks like it shouldn't be there or you run across some people who might need them, perhaps you could put them to use. Even if it isn't the mission priority.”

He wants to thank her. He wants to hug her, to hold her against him, calculated and risky and stunning. Instead he finds her hand where it lies in the sand between them and presses it delicately and they sit watch together surrounded by quiet, trying to write a better world into the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to start this week off with fluff, but the prompt got the better of me.
> 
> One of the things that bothers me about the discourse surrounding the Captain America movies as part of the MCU is the way the people who create them talk about then vs. now, especially in regards to ethics. There seems to be a perception that the ethical dilemmas and the choices made at the highest levels of power are more complex today, that things were far more black and white in the time when Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter were fighting their first war. I don't believe that's true. I think that the policies regarding, for example, drone use, are just as important as the decisions about how to handle the mass exploitation and murder of Jews, Romani, the disabled, LGBT+ people, and others during WWII.
> 
> These crimes were absolutely known to the Allied powers. In 1942, Jan Karski brought film reels to the UK and published a pamphlet called The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland which was publicly distributed. By 1944, the US and others had proof of death camps. The arguments Peggy cites in this story are part of the Auschwitz bombing debate; more [here](https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008041). Significant amounts of information were available to even the average citizen [on the pages of the newspaper](http://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust-Important-Newspaper/dp/0521812879), much less members of the military, especially special members as Steve and Peggy were.
> 
> I wrote this at least a week ago, before the Hydra Cap debate started, so it's not meant as a reaction to that. But I can't believe that Peggy and Steve, who were both extremely active and principled individuals, could have known about what was going on and done nothing about it.
> 
> Other notes:  
> \- The Jews of Czechoslovakia were largely sent to Auschwitz.  
> \- I did basic, _basic_ research on the Tunisia/North Africa campaigns, but they ended mid-1943. I'm fudging a little to assume that a single HYDRA outpost might have gone unnoticed.  
>  \- Steve and Bucky would have lived very near Jewish communities in Brooklyn, likely including people with family still in Europe.  
> \- Dernier references the 1942 Vel d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. Around 42,000 French Jews were send to Auschwitz in 1942. Of those, 13,152 were arrested during the roundup on July 16-17, with help by French police. 811 survived.  
> \- In March of 1943, there was a Stop Hitler Now! rally in Madison Square Garden. 20,000 people attended. 55,000 more were turned away because of lack of space.


End file.
